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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

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Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#21

Post by tikhonj »

pedalpete wrote: post #14
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

I did a bit of research in program synthesis, which is probably the closest academic field to this sort of thing (albeit in the realm of programming languages rather than AI/ML). I have two main conclusions:

• Current methods to generate programs fundamentally do not scale. Most practical research is about how to extend small-scale synthesis systems to large-scale problems, rather than synthesizing large programs outright.

• The best way to scale these systems is to make them more interactive. Let the programmer do what's easy for humans and use synthesis for the parts easy to automate. This is another way of saying that program synthesis is less about fully automatic programming and more about (radically) better development tools.

I am confident that we will not have automatic programming systems that can handle non-trivial programs by themselves in the next 10/20 years, barring the sort of paradigm-shifting breakthroughs we can't really predict. Instead, we will have systems that can generate some amount of code and work in tandem with programmers—perhaps through sketching[1], programming by demonstration or just much-improved Intellisense.

The current trajectory is that programming is to become easier, not obsolete. The result will not be fewer programmers but more programmers, largely because people with less expertise will be able to become programmers: think Jevons Paradox[2] for programming.

Programming as a job will change and people will certainly have to adapt, but the job as a whole is not going anywhere.

[1]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/asolar/papers/thesis.pdf

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#22

Post by orthoganol »

pedalpete wrote: post #14
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

Replaceable or replaceable by AI?

Already today standard CRUD web development is largely automateable. I already have my own specialized scripts from years of experience, targeting backend, front end, design components, that generate most of what I want with some basic inputs. I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too.

This kind of approach already does replace programmers, and could do so a lot more. But what do you mean by replaceable by AI? How would that work?

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#23

Post by ThomPete »

pedalpete wrote: post #14
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

I don't think the replacement of programmers is going to come in the form of AI actually writing code in any normal context we consider writing code.

It's more going to be that a lot of the superficial patterns if/then (and quite a lot of scripting) that are being done today will be easily replaced. Not that writing a new kernel or some other advanced job is going to be handled by machines.

In that context I think it's going to go fast and be in our lifetime.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#24

Post by thoughtsimple »

pedalpete wrote: post #14
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

How long is that though? Decades? More? How do you train a neural net to take a vague description of a desired outcome and produce results that fit the requirements? We are no where close to the general AI that would be required.

I certainly believe that classes of automation problems will be done by machine learning but I have a very hard time believing all programming tasks are going to be replaced any time soon.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#25

Post by nl »

carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

I hesitate to say I'm an AI researcher, but I dabble, follow the work closely and run a research program in related field.

I'm generally considered unduly optimistic about AI progress, but 3-5 years is way too optimistic.

For some business-algorithm tasks with large amounts of data we may begin to see tools like NTMs etc become viable in that time frame.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#26

Post by maxxxxx »

carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

I have my doubts about the timeframe but I agree that many coding tasks will go away. I bet the web will stagnate at some point the way desktop started to stagnate. Same for infrastructure for most applications. There will be plenty of areas where AI supported solutions will be "good enough".

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#27

Post by pedalpete »

ThomPete wrote: post #23
pedalpete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

I don't think the replacement of programmers is going to come in the form of AI actually writing code in any normal context we consider writing code. It's more going to be that a lot of the superficial patterns if/then (and quite a lot of scripting) that are being done today will be easily replaced. Not that writing a new kernel or some other advanced job is going to be handled by machines. In that context I think it…

Agreed, I don't think the 'average programmer' is writing new kernels or ... advanced job'. The average programmer is working at an SME or Agency, getting systems to run, sales to happen and be tracked.

I'm basing this on the amount of jobs and interviews I've been to where the tasks are normally completely uninteresting from a technical stand-point. I now work at a government science and technology research agency and much of the work here is still quite rote.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#28

Post by Hydraulix989 »

Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too.

If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs.

There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing now at your desk as a coder becomes a "tool" or already exists as a library.

It will eventually be like self-driving cars: Not totally automated, but enough to make the job of programming like a modern-day pilot's -- throw it in autopilot, and then step in whenever (rarely) necessary. Then people will realize fewer people are needed to keep watch and step in, and that one person is enough to do the same thing as many people.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#29

Post by pedalpete »

orthoganol wrote: post #22
pedalpete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

Replaceable or replaceable by AI? Already today standard CRUD web development is largely automateable. I already have my own specialized scripts from years of experience, targeting backend, front end, design components, that generate most of what I want with some basic inputs. I imagine most experienced web developers have some internal tooling like this too. This kind of approach already does replace programmers, an…

I hadn't strictly thought this out, but I guess what I'm thinking is that your basic CRUD scripts on steroids. What if it didn't need your domain knowledge to run the scripts? What if the styled output of the scripts was high-quality UI? - Not to shame your scripts, but I'm thinking back to my Rails days and though I could 'generate' everything, I then would have to manually go in and edit the code so that it did what we really wanted.

What if the person requesting whatever function (report, process, notification, etc) could have this system built without a developer?

That make developers replaceable. I'm not suggesting this is happening in the short-term, but as you say yourself, you use scripts for your basic CRUD development. What is stopping those scripts from moving up market to the point where you are not needed.

Front-end devs who used to write HTML and CSS would have said they where always needed because a computer can't make a webpage. But look at SquareSpace, Wix and the like. Again, this isn't every job, but this is a portion of the market which is no longer served by a person, and that will continue.

The new jobs will be in training and building these systems, which I think is historically how industrialization has progressed.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#30

Post by byw »

pedalpete wrote: post #14
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

I used to think this way, but this assumes there's an upper limit to demand. I think as the capability of tools increase, so will user expectations in capabilities and coverage.

Sure, programming will be more about asking the right questions than implementing solutions. We'd think that'll be easy, but most people have no idea what they want in life, and philosophy is still hard.

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